1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements in the ink jet color printing and multi-color ink jet technology. The present invention relates to an apparatus and system for printing on large elongate printable substrates, including but not limited to textiles.
2. Background and Discussion of the Prior Art
Industrial printing of textiles began in the 18th century and for about two hundred years intaglio copper roller printing was the preferred method of printing. From the 1890's through the 20th century, in the USA, the Rice-Barton copper roller printer was the main industrial production device. Rotary screen-printing machines replaced the copper roller printers in the late 20th century as the main industrial textile printing method. Today the majority of the worlds printed textiles are produced with rotary screens. Most of the world's printed textiles are produced by thousands of industrial printing machines each with fabric spreading, and tensioning devices, fabric transport belt with belt washer, fabric dryers, and twelve or so rotary screen printing stations mounted across and synchronized with the belt. Engraving of rotary screens is a barrier to low cost, quick, and short run production. Finishing after printing requires resources such as space, energy, water, and environmental protection.
Ink jet textile printing has been practiced in studios and small shops since the 1990's, but production has not yet reached full industrial dimension. Until recently ink jet has been used for short runs, for high couture, art production, one-of-a-kind high-end items, and rapid pre-production marketing samples.
Until now it has been a prevailing opinion that the introduction of ink jet printing would be disruptive to traditional printing and that new simple finishing methods would arise that would allow small, high cost, low speed, digital print production runs to happen close to the end user of the textile and thus eliminate the low cost, high speed, traditional textile print processor. So far this has not happened. This invention makes it possible to incorporate digital printing into the traditional production process in a non-disruptive and synergistically dynamic manner.
Centuries of industrial textile production have resulted in a cost conscious, market oriented, worldwide textile industry. Studio print production of digital imagery has shown the value of digital printing, it's ability to reproduce fine gradients, photographs and any digital image rapidly and routinely on fabric. Meanwhile the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, along with digital imaging means has transformed the world's images into digital creations, easily available for direct digital printing. This invention makes a bridge from the digital imaging world to the industrial textile-printing world.
It has been shown by Hewlett-Packard (“HP”), Agfa and others that it is possible to print industrial webs with fixed, full-width print engines, where the ink jet head does not move on a shuttle back and forth across the substrate but remains stationary. This type of print engine uses arrays of print head dies with many thousands of ink jet nozzles and has a printing speed of industrial magnitude.
Since the rise of the Internet and also the replacement of silver based photography by digital photography and the widespread use of digital scanners, most images originate as, or are converted into RGB images. In the days before the widespread use of these RGB digital images, most images were printed as multi-color separations usually CMYB images and in the early days of digital printing special types of digital files were used that incorporated images as multi-color (channel) separations such as the Scitex image format.
The art desires a practical industrial system for printing elongate conveyed fibrous substrates, such as textiles, in a broad range of printing effects in art quality printed images. The art desires a multi-color printing system for elongate conveyed printable substrates, particularly including textiles, which system is high speed and commercially practicable, and yet faithfully produces an art quality image, such as a digital RGB image. The present invention provides a solution to these art needs.